Remind cofounders Brett Kopf and David Kopf with their new CEO, Brian Grey. (Credit: Plume Design)

For a parent-teacher app, the first week back at school is like the Super Bowl.

New students arrive, classrooms set their routines for the school year and engagement's never higher. After guiding Remind through another such high season, Brett Kopf and his brother David are bringing in an outside digital veteran to take over as head coach.

Remind announced on Wednesday that it's named Brian Grey as CEO. Grey's track record includes more than three years as chief executive of Bleacher Report and executive roles at Fox Sports Interactive, Yahoo! and AOL. The transition comes as Remind has reached a new user milestone, crossing 20 million monthly active users among teachers, parents and students across the U.S.

The younger Kopf, Brett, will step into a role as something of a customer advocate and evangelist for the product, traveling the country visiting schools to see how they use Remind or why they don't. "It's crazy how much Remind has grown since we started in a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto," Kopf says. "What the company needs is a strong user voice and voice for the community, someone at the front lines talking to our users and solving their problems."

The older Kopf, David—both made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2012—will remain with Brett on Remind's board of directors and focus on the company's data initiatives. "We saw this juncture coming," he says. "We thought bringing someone in would help us with our vision, and the first time we spoke to Brian, we talked for three hours and walked away thinking we wanted someone like that."

Grey met Remind through Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture firm that led a $15 million Series B funding round in Remind in February 2014, when it was still called Remind101. Longtime Kleiner leader John Doerr would invest another $40 million that September. Grey says both his parents are teachers, his father with 50 years of experience, and having watched his daughters go through the school process themselves, education was on the short list of areas into which he'd still want to jump.

"Having been in the media world for as many years as I have, I have a good appreciation for the power of network and how it can help consumers discover good content that matters to them, and how digital gives users personal choice," says Grey. "What Remind has built mirrored that in an interesting way, and the capability this company has is really special."

Originally a simple messaging app for teachers to securely communicate with students and parents in a way that maintained privacy and some controls, Remind has evolved in recent months to include capabilities for administrators and other professionals in a school. The app also recently launched an activities feature that makes it easier for teachers to coordinate trips, fundraisers and other events and reach parents for their approval and participation. Activities has seen a 4x spike in usage in the month it's been live so far, Brett Kopf says.

Remind's focus under Grey will be to continue to deepen those offerings, he says, while reducing the friction of communication and enabling more services that can be performed within the app. The company also is collecting data on top of those functions that could prove useful to educators and schools.

"Our more audacious goal is to connect 100% of students online with the advocates they need to succeed and have 100% of those students graduate," Grey says.

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